Posts tagged ‘Interaction Rituals’

There are a lot of great thinkers out there. You can tell by reading their books, studying their theories, looking at the articles they publish, seeing how their viewpoints find their way into our world etc. I wonder what would happen if one could combine, integrate or otherwise bring together the expressions and thoughts from these Great Thinkers, Thought Leaders, Trendwatchers, Futurists, Authors, Humanists, Rationalists, Satirists, Moralists, Essayists, Masters, Inspirators (just to name a few “categories”)? Here’s a trial overview with in alfabetical order their names, and in between brackets the statements, thoughts, expressions or ideas which for several reasons personally inspired me to combine them into this list. They represent thoughts or values or ideas or concepts I personally believe in very much. Ofcourse this list will never be complete, please feel free to tip me for additions. If time allows, maybe I’ll combine this list into some kind of integrated mindmap or other oversight viewpoint. This post is updated each time I find a new statement I think should be added to the list.

Maya Angelou (1: I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel; 2: The idea is to write it so that people hear it and it slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart; 3: If one is lucky, a solitary fantasy can totally transform one million realities; 4: Never make someone a priority when all you are to them is an option)

Jurgen Appelo (Agile Management, Management 3.0)

Aristoteles (Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom)

Chris Argyris (Defensive Routines, Double Loop Learning)

William Rosh Ashby (The Law of Requisite Variety, The Darkness Principle)

W Edwards Deming (No one can enjoy learning if he must constantly be concerned about being graded for his performance)

Steve Denning (The most important story is not the one we tell, it is the one we generate in the mind of the listener)

Peter Drucker (Culture eats Strategy for Breakfast)

Eric Duquette (Do not allow yourself or others to be defined by your limitations, but rather, abilities)

Albert Einstein (1: Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler; 2: We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them, 3: The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant; 4: Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary; Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere)

Doug Floyd (You don’t get harmony when everybody sings the same note)

Benjamin Franklin (Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn)

Gabor (If you want to achieve greatness stop asking for permission)

Galileo Galilei (You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him find it within himself)

Dee Hock (The problem is never how to get new, innovative thoughts into your mind, but how to get old ones out.)

Eric Hoffer (Creativity is the ability to introduce order into the randomness of nature)

Grace Hopper (It’s always been done that way)

Victor Hugo (to love beauty is to see light)

David K. Hurst (Renewal requires destruction)

Steve Jobs (The art of leaving things out)

Joseph Joubert (Never cut what you can untie, the mind can tell us what not to do or avoid, the heart can tell us what to do)

Helen Keller (Keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see the shadows)

Kevin Kelly (Make customers as smart as you are, Connect customer to customers, All things being equal choose technology that connects, Imagine your customers as employees)

John F. Kennedy (we go to the moon not because it’s easy, but because it’s difficult)

Thomas Kuhn (Ladder of Inference, You don’t see something until you have the right metafor to let you perceive it)

Dalai Lama ( 1: If you think you are too small to make a difference, try sleeping with a mosquito; 2: Don’t try to invent everything yourself, you just don’t have the time for it; 3: Strive for modesty but it’s ok if it can’t be reached)

Niccolo Machiavelli (1: I’m not interested in preserving the status quo; I want to overthrow it, 2: It is much more secure to be feared than to be loved’3: Since it is difficult to join them together, it is safer to be feared than to be loved when one of the two must be lacking; 4: There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things)

William L. McKnight (If you put fences around people, you get sheep)

Margaret Mead (Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has)

Robert Metcalfe (the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system)

Friedrich Christoph Oetinger (Give me courage to change things which must be changed;And the wisdom to distinguish one from the other)

Joseph Chilton Pearce (To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong)

Laurence J. Peter (The Peter Principle, “in a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence”)

Jaap Peters (Het Rijnland Boekje)

Katasai Rakshasa (Those who fear the darkness have no idea what the light can do)

Joshua Cooper Ramo (Conformity to old ideas is lethal; it is rebellion that is going to change the planet)

Ayn Rand (The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me)

Kurt A. Richardson (If each element ‘knew’ what was happening to the system as a whole, all of the complexity would have to be present in that element)

Jeremy Rifkin (Third Industrial Revolution and the 5 pillars that will support it’s success)

Will Rogers (If Stupidity got us into this mess, then why can’t it get us out?)

Eleanor Roosevelt (The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams)

Jim Rohn (Unless you change how you are, you will always have what you’ve got)

Betrand Russel (To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom)

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (As for the future, your task is not to foresee it, but to enable it)

Adi Da Samray (Relax. Nothing is under control.)

John Scully (The future belongs to those who see possibilities before they become obvious)

Peter Senge (Learning Organization)

George Bernard Shaw (1: Lack of money is the root of all evil, 2: You see things; and you say, ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were; and I say, “Why not?” 3:Those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything)

Clay Shirki (Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution)

Herbert Simon (Bounded Rationality)

Simon Sinek? (Real collaboration is when the idea can no longer be traced to one person. It is legitimately ours.)

Ulbo De Sitter (founder of the sociotechnique in the Netherlands: “complex tasks in a simple organization instead of simple tasks in a complex organization”)

Dave Snowden (Cynefin Sensemaking Framework)

Henry David Thoreau (It is only when we forget all our learning that we begin to know)

Mark Twain (Do the thing you fear most and the death of fear is certain)

Lao-Tzu (Those who have knowledge, don’t predict. Those who predict, don’t have knowledge)

Leonardo da Vinci (Simplicity is the Ultimate Sophistication)

Voltaire (Common Sense is not so Common)

Mathieu Weggeman (The faster you get smarter, the sooner you will be dumber)

Margaret Wheatley (It’s lonely to be in the future… first)

Stuart Wilde (Everything is out there waiting for you. All you have to do is walk up and declare yourself in. No need for permission. You just need courage to say, “Include me”. Providing you have the energy to pull it off you can do what you like. And the Universal Law, being impartial, will be only too delighted to deliver.)

Frank Zappa(Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible)

Finally, Albert Einstein once quoted: “great spirits have often encountered violent opposition from weak minds“. Given this quote, I sincerely hope this post will be read by others (be it great spirits/visionairs just like the ones listed here or anybody else) so that an even more combined vision can be created together with all of you who read this and like to extend the list.

Goffman’s Interaction Rituals inspired me. Wikipedia says the following: “Once an individual gives out a positive self image of themselves to others they then feel a need to keep or live up to that set image. When individuals are inconsistent with how they project themselves in society, they risk being embarrassed or discredited, therefore the individual remains consistently guarded, making sure that they do not show themselves in an unfavorable way to others.”

This (very common) human behaviour is in my opinion driven largely by fear, in fact fear for inconsistent behaviour and/or fear for being “tagged” as incompetent (fear for incompetency). In a society like ours, where fear is most often regarded as a taboo, it is therefore very very, sometimes extremely difficult to change existing “systems” or “system of systems” just because we dare not to say to our environment that we were wrong earlier. We rather keep up appearance that everything is fine, is ok, even though in our deepest heart we know it is not of we know we would like to change the systems we designed ourselves in the past. Fear is therefore an emotion with a negative connotation and is hidden or suppressed at large. This is because we do not dare to publicly show that we have these kind of fears. This in fact is because society would make us a victim and victims are not really accepted in our society. The real victim here is however the society itself by allowing all of us to sustain our hidden/suppressed fear behaviour. This behaviour can lead to strategies like re-use before buy/build, whereby we don’t want to replace existing designs by new designs, just because once ago (sometimes long ago), we designed such a system ourselves. Take the financial system as an example: we collectively designed that in the past, now we see through recession that it doesn’t work optimally anymore, but yet our collective fears for redesiging the system blocks us from innovation where it is most needed.

So what’s the remedy? In fact, it is super simple. The opposite of fear is respect/caring/love for each other, showing to each other that no-one’s really to blame, allowing each other to make mistakes because that’s human. Imagine the innovation power our society would obtain if we were able to replace all fear with love! I therefore am a great supporter of Peter Senge’s 5th discipline about learning organizations (learning culture) and also a believer in Dalai Lama’s statement: Learn by errors made by others, you don’t have time to repeat them. This had inspired me to replace the traditional re-use before buy before build paradigm with re-search before re-use before… So take “re” “search” serious: if you are going to (re)design a system, first re-search before re-use and innovate if another has had already better ideas than you (principle: follow the knowledge).